Published 4:00 am, Thursday, March 25, 1999

If Arthur Angle's quest to return the remains of Ishi, California's most famous American Indian, to his homeland was a made-for-television movie, the happy ending should have come yesterday at the Smithsonian Institution.

That was where Angle led a delegation of Northern California Indians to press their claim to Ishi's brain, stored by the Washington, D.C., museum since shortly after his 1916 death in San Francisco from tuberculosis.

Angle hoped that the Smithsonian would approve his plan to bury the brain in the remote Tehama County wilderness where the Yahi, Ishi's now-extinct tribe, once lived.

Instead, the Smithsonian politely informed Angle's delegation that it has no legal claim to the brain.

Not that the Smithsonian wants to keep the organ, officials there say. Nor does it object to reuniting the brain with the cremated remains of the rest of Ishi's body, now resting in a Colma cemetery.

But the national museum must follow the letter and the spirit of federal law, which says that it can only hand over Indian remains to tribes or individuals directly descended from or culturally affiliated with them.

In Ishi's case, that is hard to do, because his people were wiped out by California bounty hunters and disease around the turn of the century.

"The whole issue here is not whether we will repatriate the remains of Ishi, but to whom," said Thomas W. Killion, the Smithsonian's director of repatriation. The delegation that visited the Smithsonian yesterday, Killion said, are members of the Maidu tribe from Butte County and have no cultural affiliation with the Yahi.

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"It's a little bit frustrating," Angle said after meeting with Smithsonian officials. "We understand that they have to work within the law, that is their job. But we are here to do our job, and I think our job is to reunite Ishi and place him in his homeland in a proper Native American ceremony."

The Smithsonian's dilemma means the continuation of the bizarre saga of the starved and traumatized man in his 40s who staggered out of the wilderness into Oroville in 1911. He became famous as the last Yahi and the last California Indian to live a prehistoric life -- a history studied by California schoolchildren for generations.

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